{"title":"Ana Blandiana","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"my-native-land-a4-book-ana-blandiana-9781780371054","title":"My Native Land A4","description":"Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident before for the fall of Communism, and now her country's strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceausescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. She was co-founder and President of the Civic Alliance from 1990, an independent non-political organisation that fought for freedom and democratic change, and more recently co-founded the Memorial for the Victims of Communism. Blandiana redefines her poetics in every new book of poetry she publishes. In My Native Land A4 she recreates a land of words, water, trees, cities with abandoned churches, fallen angels that cannot find their way back to heaven, and gods that learn to roller-skate to try to reach the young who remain oblivious of their existence. She projects visionary spaces within the confines of a page - the A4 sheet of her title - which emerge out of her imagination as anguished territories in which the lyrical 'I' is compelled to draw precise, clear boundaries out of a diffuse magma of words. The poems articulate a quest for love, beauty and truth and affirm an urgent need for existential authenticity as a requisite for the redemption of the self, chronicling the struggle between a constantly deteriorating body that is learning how to die and the spirit that strives to overcome its physical constraints. My Native Land A4 contains meditations on fundamental themes such as the fragility and vulnerability of being, the inexorable toll of time, the limitations of the human condition and the correspondence between life and death within the cosmic rhythms of the universe.  The print edition of My Native Land A4 only includes the English translations. The e-book with audio is a bilingual Romanian-English edition with most of the poems read in Romanian by Ana Blandiana.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49520586227985,"sku":"GOR006415396","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50157838532881,"sku":"GOR011496866","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50390784672017,"sku":"CIN1780371055A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51052472500497,"sku":"NIN9781780371054","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1780371055.jpg?v=1751452317"},{"product_id":"hour-of-sand-book-ana-blandiana-9780856462405","title":"The Hour of Sand","description":"Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's most admired and popular poets. Her delicate, subtle and pointed poetry has gained her a large readership at home, where she has received the highest literary awards. Her poetry is direct, personal and uncompromising in its vision; it has strong traditional roots, both literary and spiritual, yet is acutely responsive to present-day concerns. Ana Blandiana's poetry and prose have been widely translated in Europe, but \"The Hour of Sand\" is the first selection of her poems to appear in English. It introduces a fresh and distinctive voice in Eastern European poetry.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49572346528017,"sku":"GOR002005532","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53458227986705,"sku":"GOR003260606","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0856462403.jpg?v=1751044015"},{"product_id":"sun-of-hereafter-ebb-of-the-senses-book-ana-blandiana-9781780373843","title":"The Sun of Hereafter  Ebb of the Senses","description":"Ana Blandiana is one of Romania's foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and now her country's strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceausescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. Over the years, her works have become the symbol of an ethical consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian government. This new translation by Viorica Patea and Paul Scott Derrick combines her two collections, The Sun of Hereafter (2000) and Ebb of the Senses (2004), both written after the fall of the Iron Curtain while Blandiana was actively and selflessly involved in the public sphere as President of the Civic Alliance (1990-2001), a non-political organisation that made possible Romania's integration into the European Union. These two books mark a turning point in Blandiana's poetic evolution: they lead towards a new conception of poetry as a reflection on being that culminates in My Native Land A4 (first published in Romania in 2010 and published in English by Bloodaxe in 2014). After 1989, the motifs of her poetry remain the same but they acquire a more universal dimension. For Blandiana, the writer is less a creator than a witness of the world she inhabits. She believes that poetry records the experience of one's time and insists that it is 'not a series of events, but a sequence of visions'. Blandiana's poetry oscillates between the sensual perception of the world and a nostalgia for transcendence. Enigmatic definitions alternate with a series of coded questions charged with melancholic gravity. In fact, her poetry could be seen as a quest for definitions reached through a series of questions. Her poems describe the degradation of humanistic values and the different ways in which the individual is threatened. They express a yearning for a state of primordial purity and an awareness of destructive forces which the self must confront.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49735644610833,"sku":"NGR9781780373843","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50160884187409,"sku":"GOR010195174","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50390800695569,"sku":"CIN1780373848VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51052529680657,"sku":"NIN9781780373843","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1780373848.jpg?v=1751059671"},{"product_id":"five-books-book-ana-blandiana-9781780375380","title":"Five Books","description":"Ana Blandiana is one of Romanias foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and winner of the Griffin Trust Lifetime Recognition Award in 2018. This new translation combines five books, three of protest poems from the 1980s plus two collections of love poetry, the most recent written after the death of her husband.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49738510663953,"sku":"NGR9781780375380","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50157819298065,"sku":"GOR013874858","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50157838369041,"sku":"GOR012280493","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51052065489169,"sku":"NIN9781780375380","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52655173894417,"sku":"NLS9781780375380","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1780375387.jpg?v=1750832453"},{"product_id":"shadow-of-words-book-ana-blandiana-9781780375403","title":"The Shadow of Words","description":"Ana Blandiana is one of Romania’s foremost poets, a leading dissident before the fall of Communism, and now one of her country’s strongest candidates for the Nobel Prize. A prominent opponent of the Ceaușescu regime, Blandiana became known for her daring, outspoken poems as well as for her courageous defence of ethical values. Over the years, her works have become the symbol of a moral consciousness that refuses to be silenced by a totalitarian government.   The Shadow of Words covers Blandiana’s early collections published from 1964 to 1981, as well as including uncollected poems from that period which only appeared in anthologies. It follows My Native Land A4 (2014), The Sun of Hereafter • Ebb of the Senses (2017) and Five Books (2021) in completing Bloodaxe’s presentation of Blandiana’s collected poems to date in English translation. She published these poems during the brief period of political thaw of Romania’s communist regime, when aestheticism took on a more subversive role, reaffirming the autonomy of the poetic word and freeing it from the stultifying demands of propagandist proletarian art.   In her early poems, Blandiana’s voice articulates a pure and vibrant spiritual language of unmistakable ethical clarity, calling for moral regeneration in the face of indifference. Their ethical idealism and steadfastness override the many masks of degradation. These youthful books announce from the outset the sense of responsibility and faith in the survival of the collective soul that has always characterised Blandiana’s poetry.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50982832242961,"sku":"NGR9781780375403","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51216193454353,"sku":"GOR014122414","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51383764222225,"sku":"NIN9781780375403","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52473312706833,"sku":"NLS9781780375403","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52963820536081,"sku":"GOR014671439","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1780375409.jpg?v=1751987309"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/fr-fr\/collections\/auteur-livres-de-ana-blandiana.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}